1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an electronic device comprising different peripherals, and more particularly to an electronic device having a general purpose interface controller capable of providing data and control signal transmissions among the peripherals.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most electronic devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), or global positioning system (GPS) navigators, usually integrate various kinds of peripherals, such as a liquid crystal module (LCM), memory, a camera module, and universal serial bus (USB) devices, and the like. Thus, making efficient peripheral integration of the electronic device is important for electronic device efficiency.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional implementation for integrating various kinds of peripherals in a handheld device. A handheld device 100 comprises master devices 102, slave controllers 104, a generic direct memory access (DMA) controller 106, an on-chip memory 108, master controllers 110, and slave devices 112. Each of the master devices 102 has a corresponding slave controller 104 (e.g. the slave controller 1 corresponds to the master device 1, the slave controller 2 corresponds to the master device 2, and so on), and each of the slave devices 112 has a corresponding master controller 110 as well (e.g. the master controller 1 corresponds to the slave device 1, the master controller 2 corresponds to the slave device 2, and so on). One of the slave controllers 104 may receive data and first control signals from its corresponding master device 102, convert the first control signals to a request signal, and forward the data and request signal to the generic DMA controller 106. The generic DMA controller 106 stores the received data and request signal in the on-chip memory 108, and then forwards the data and request signal stored in the on-chip memory 108 to one of the master controllers 110 corresponding to the request signal. The master controller 110 receives the data and request signal, converts the request signal to second control signals recognized by its corresponding slave device 112, and forwards the data and the second control signals to the corresponding slave device 112. One disadvantage of the conventional implementation is that it consumes excessive space when a new peripheral (i.e. a master/slave device) is introduced into the handheld device, since each master/slave device needs a dedicated slave/master controller to transmit/receive data and control signals. Therefore, a need exists to provide more efficient systems and methods for signal transmission between various types of electronic modules.